Weekend Reading: Google, Blackbox

Several notable items about the data center industry appeared in the news and/or blogs over the weekend:

Business Week looks at Google's data center site location process in a story titled The High Cost of Wooing Google. The story notes that Google "plays the real estate game aggressively" and states that some North Carolina officials "felt bullied" by the process in Lenoir. This story goes to great lengths to portray Google as having behaved badly in its data center site location process. Aside from some of its unusual efforts to ensure secrecy, I don't know that Google's tactics were any more aggressive than other corporations making major site location decisions. But the BW article will probably get some notice.

Scientific American has a lengthy article on the development of Sun's Project Blackbox, particularly the role of alumni of Thinking Machines, Inc. in designing the "data center in a box."

Isabel Wang has an interesting post on new IDC data on virtualization and what those trends may mean for the dedicated server sector.

John Rath rounds up resources on data center virtualization, some of which might be new to readers who are building their virtualization expertise.

Michael Halligan of BitPusher relays the tale of packets that were routed 1,700 miles to arrive three floors away in the same building.